1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to transaction receipts, and more particularly, to generation of an electronic receipt at a point-of-sale.
2. Related Art
Business management requires careful tracking of expenses incurred by employees on behalf of the business. Expenses made by employees can take a variety of forms such as travel and meal expenses. Conventional expense tracking includes an employer requiring employees to report expenses, and an accounting and taxation department of the employer to collect expense reports submitted by employees including the paper receipts. The accounting and taxation department then organizes and reviews the expense reports including paper receipts and determines where money is being spent for tracking and tax purposes. In some cases, the employer provides an electronic expense reporting system into which employees can enter expense report data.
The above approach to expense reporting suffers from a number of drawbacks relating to use of paper receipts. First, the approach requires an employee to retain paper receipts for submission as part of the expense report. Since receipts are usually small pieces of paper, it is not an infrequent occurrence that they become lost or are destroyed. Once paper receipts are no longer available, the benefit of tracking expenses is lost. Second, in some cases, an employer provides an electronic reporting system that requires an employee to enter expense data from paper receipts. Entry into an electronic reporting system, while easing expense-reporting burdens in some ways, creates a number of problems. One problem is that even the most conscientious user is apt to make entry errors. For example, one of the benefits of an electronic reporting system is that it allows entry of expense categorizations. Unfortunately, entry of these categorizations is prone to keying errors just like any other data entry, and more importantly, is subject to the employee's subjectivity. Since most employees are unaware of the details and meaning of the myriad of expense categorizations that an accounting and taxation department provides, mis-categorization occurs frequently. Where an electronic reporting system is not provided, the accounting and taxation department must evaluate paper receipts, which tends to promote discontinuous expense tracking and end-of-tax-year rushes to collect data. Third, in many cases, an employee must provide line-item details for accurate expense reporting purposes because of paper receipts' limitations, e.g., because of size, to communicate all transaction details. In this regard, any expense reporting system, electronic or otherwise, is prone to cheating because of the reliance on employees to honestly expound on the transaction details that the paper receipts purport to record. Fourth, paper receipts, like all paper-based document systems, require large amounts of storage space, which adds further expenses to a business.
In order to minimize the above shortcomings of paper receipts, many businesses allow employees to use credit cards to pay for business expenses. In many cases, credit card charge data may be provided in electronic form to a credit card holder in the form of date, merchant, total bill and, perhaps, an expense category. This information may then be linked to a particular expense account for tracking. While this information is helpful, credit card systems are generally incapable of collecting, storing and providing the extensive transaction details often required for proper expense reporting, e.g., line-item(s) purchased, number of items purchased, purchaser identification, item(s) description, etc. Internet merchants have been known to provide more extensive transaction data in electronic form such as date, merchant and item(s) purchased. Not all purchases, however, can be made using a credit card or over the Internet. For example, some purchases must be made at point-of-sale terminals with cash or check where the paper receipt is the only transaction record available. Surprisingly, in many cases, merchants may want to collect the extensive expense reporting data regarding a transaction for biometric evaluation, but are unwilling to burden customers with all the requisite queries.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for generation of an electronic receipt at a point-of sale that solves the problems of the related art.